Demolition is the phase where a remodel either stays on budget or stops being the project you priced. Everything hidden inside the walls becomes visible in the first two days, and how that discovery is handled — sequenced and inspected, or swung at with a sledgehammer — determines whether it is information or damage.
We do selective interior demolition as part of our own remodels and as a standalone service for homeowners, designers and other contractors who want the teardown done cleanly and legally before their trade starts.
Testing Comes Before Demolition, Not After
This is the part most homeowners do not expect, and the part that cannot be skipped.
Asbestos. Colorado regulates asbestos abatement through CDPHE Regulation 8, and residential renovation that will disturb more than the state trigger levels — 32 square feet, 50 linear feet, or the equivalent of a 55-gallon drum — requires inspection by a certified building inspector before the work starts. In practice that catches a lot of ordinary metro remodels, because the materials most likely to contain asbestos are exactly the ones people want gone: popcorn ceiling texture, vinyl floor tile and the mastic under it, sheet flooring backing, duct wrap, and old pipe insulation. Anything from before the mid-1980s is suspect until it is tested.
Testing is cheap. Disturbing asbestos and finding out afterwards means a stop-work, a certified abatement contractor, and a house that has to be cleared before anyone goes back in.
Lead. Most metro housing stock predates 1978, and work disturbing painted surfaces in pre-1978 housing falls under the federal lead renovation, repair and painting rule — containment, specified work practices and cleaning verification, performed by a certified firm.
Mold. Wet framing behind a bathroom wall or under a failed window is a common find. It changes scope, and it is better found on day one than after the new tile is set.
We do not begin demolition on a pre-1980s house until the testing question is settled. That is not caution for its own sake — it is the difference between a scheduled project and a stopped one.
Structure First: What Holds the House Up
Before anything comes out, we establish what carries load. A wall that is opened before its bearing condition is known is a wall that gets shored in an emergency, and emergency shoring costs more than planned shoring every time.
Where a bearing wall is coming out, the sequence is: engineer’s design, permit, temporary shoring installed and verified, then removal, then the beam. Where the wall is not bearing, the sequence is much shorter — but that determination is made by inspection, not by looking at it. The structural side is covered in detail on our load-bearing wall removal page.
Utilities: Locate, Isolate, Verify
The four things inside a wall that turn a demolition day into an incident:
- Electrical. Circuits traced and killed at the panel, then verified dead at the wall — not assumed from a breaker label, which in a house with thirty years of amateur work is fiction. Older stock may hold knob-and-tube or aluminum branch wiring, both of which change the electrical scope.
- Plumbing. Supply isolated, and the waste and vent layout mapped before anything is cut. A stack discovered mid-demolition is the single most expensive surprise in a kitchen project.
- Gas. Capped by a licensed trade, pressure tested, never left to a fitting that “looks closed”.
- HVAC. Ducts sealed off before the dust starts, or the system distributes demolition debris through the entire house and the return side has to be professionally cleaned afterwards.
Dust Control and Containment
Interior demolition in an occupied house is a containment job as much as a teardown. Our standard practice is sealed poly barriers with zippered access at the work boundary, floor and stair protection on the path out, HVAC registers and returns sealed, negative air with HEPA filtration where the work warrants it, and cleanup at the end of each day rather than the end of the job.
Colorado’s Regulation 8 also governs dust and particulate control on the work itself. The practical point for a homeowner living through a remodel: the difference between contained demolition and uncontained demolition is a fine layer of gypsum dust on every horizontal surface in the house, including inside cabinets two rooms away.
What We Demolish
- Full kitchen and bathroom teardowns, including cabinetry, counters, fixtures and tile
- Interior wall removal, bearing and non-bearing, with shoring where required
- Flooring removal down to the subfloor or slab — tile, thinset, hardwood, carpet, vinyl and mastic
- Popcorn and textured ceiling removal, following testing
- Basement demolition, including previous finishes that failed
- Deck, fence and shed removal
- Concrete cutting and slab removal for new footings, plumbing runs or egress openings
- Selective exterior demolition where an addition ties into the existing structure
Debris, Dumpsters and Disposal
Volume is always underestimated. A kitchen produces more than people expect, and a whole-basement teardown produces far more. We size the container to the scope, and where a permit is needed to place a container in the right-of-way we pull it.
Material separation matters here for two reasons. Some jurisdictions in the metro have construction and demolition diversion requirements, and separated metal, concrete and clean wood have disposal routes that cost less than mixed debris going to landfill. Anything tested positive goes through the disposal stream the regulation requires, with documentation.
Access decides the price as much as volume does. A walk-out basement is a different job from a finished basement with one interior stair, and a third-floor unit with no elevator is different again.
What We Find Behind the Walls
Every metro house older than about thirty years carries a record of the work done to it, and demolition is where that record becomes readable. The recurring finds, in rough order of frequency:
- Unpermitted past work. A basement finished by a previous owner, a wall taken out without a beam, a bathroom added off a bedroom with the waste line run at the wrong fall. Once it is exposed it is visible to an inspector, and the correction becomes part of the project rather than something that can be covered back up.
- Undersized or missing headers. Most common over a widened doorway or a passthrough cut into a kitchen wall at some point in the past.
- Water damage. Behind shower walls, under windows with failed flashing, and at the rim joist in basements. Almost always larger than it looked from the stain.
- Wiring that does not match the panel. Circuits that feed two rooms and a garage, junctions buried inside a wall with no accessible box, and on older stock, knob-and-tube or aluminum branch wiring.
- Plumbing that limits the new layout. A cast iron stack in the wall you wanted to open, or supply lines run in an exterior wall where they will freeze.
- Insulation that is absent, compressed or wet. Common in additions built in the 1960s and 1970s.
None of these are unusual, and none of them are reasons to panic. They are reasons to demolish early enough in the schedule that the findings can change the plan while changing the plan is still cheap.
Demolition in an Occupied House
Most of our clients live in the house while we work in part of it. That changes the method rather than the scope.
We agree the boundary before day one — which rooms are the work zone, which door and stair is the route out, where the container sits and where the crew parks. Water and power to the rest of the house stay live wherever possible; where a shutdown is unavoidable it is scheduled and announced rather than discovered. Containment goes up before the first swing, not after the dust is already moving. Pets and small children make the containment stricter, not looser, and both are worth telling us about at the walkthrough.
The other half of living through it is noise. Demolition is the loudest phase of any remodel, and it is also the shortest — worth knowing if you work from home and need to plan the two or three days that are genuinely difficult.
Concrete, Slabs and Structural Openings
A good part of the demolition we do is not framing at all. Basement bathrooms need the slab cut for drain and vent lines, and the cut has to follow the layout the plumber has set rather than the other way round. Egress windows in a below-grade wall require a foundation opening and an excavated well, which is concrete cutting and dirt work as much as demolition. New footings for a beam or a post landing in a basement mean breaking out the slab down to bearing soil.
All of it is dust-heavy and vibration-heavy work, which is why it gets wet-cut and contained, and why it is sequenced before the finishes go anywhere near the space. Where an opening is being cut in a bearing wall or a foundation wall, the engineering and the permit come first — see load-bearing wall removal for how that sequence runs.
Demolition Before an Addition
Where an addition ties into the existing house, the demolition is surgical rather than wholesale. The exterior wall stays weathertight until the new structure is dried in, so the opening happens in the right order and never leaves the house exposed to a Front Range storm. Roof tie-ins are cut back only as far as the new framing requires. Siding, brick and stucco are cut on a line the new material can meet cleanly, because a ragged edge at the junction shows for the life of the house.
This is where sequencing beats speed. Opening the wall too early is how a remodel ends up with water inside the finished part of the house.
Common Questions
Do I need a permit for interior demolition?
For cosmetic removal in a non-bearing context, usually not on its own — but the work that follows it almost always does, and removing anything structural requires the permit before demolition starts, not after. Where the house is pre-1980s, the asbestos inspection requirement applies regardless of whether a building permit does.
How long does demolition take?
A kitchen or bathroom teardown is typically a matter of days; a full basement is longer. The schedule risk is not the labour — it is testing and abatement. If asbestos is found, an abatement contractor and a clearance step go in front of everything else, and that is a timeline we cannot compress.
Can I demolish it myself to save money?
For a non-structural, post-1980s, tested-clear space, homeowner demolition genuinely saves money and we will tell you so. What makes it a false economy is pre-1978 paint, suspect ceiling texture or flooring, anything bearing, and live utilities in the wall. The savings on labour are small compared to a contaminated house or an emergency shoring call.
What happens if you find something unexpected?
We stop, document it with photographs, and price the change before continuing — rather than absorbing it quietly and presenting it at the end. Common finds are undersized headers from unpermitted past work, water damage behind a shower wall, a waste stack in a wall slated for removal, and wiring that does not match the panel labels.
Do you clean up, or do I need a separate service?
Cleanup and disposal are part of the work. We protect the exit path, clean daily rather than only at the end, and leave the space ready for the next trade — swept, with the debris gone and the containment removed.
Where We Work
Across the Denver metro and the Front Range: Denver, Jefferson County, Arapahoe County, Douglas County, Adams County, Broomfield, Boulder County and Elbert County.
Related Services
Demolition is often one part of a larger scope. The trades we run alongside it:
- Kitchen RemodelingLayouts, cabinets, counters, full gut rebuilds
- Bathroom RemodelingPrimary baths, guest baths, wet-area rebuilds
- Basement FinishingEgress, ceiling height, permits, finished space
- Home AdditionsBump-outs, second stories, whole-room additions
- RoofingReplacement, storm damage, impact-rated options
- Deck BuildingComposite and wood decks, rails, structural repair
- FencingWood, composite and metal fence installation
- FramingStructural framing, walls, load-bearing changes
- DrywallHang, tape, texture, repair and patching
- Tile WorkFloors, showers, backsplashes, waterproofing
- PaintingInterior and exterior, prep and finish work
Where We Work
Demolition is available across our full service area. Permitting and inspection follow the county or municipality with jurisdiction over the address: